Hybrid cloud is a mixture of computing, storage as well as services from both all locations from on premises infrastructure, private clouds to public ones. Some well – known hybrid cloud service providers can be listed as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

If you are utilizing public clouds, private clouds and community ones or more, it means that you are adopting a hybrid cloud infrastructure.

1. The advantages of hybrid cloud

In spite of the fact using cloud services are really economical, the major advantage off this technology is having the ability to support a really quick digital transformation for entrepreneurs. Each organization operates their process under two agendas which are the IT agenda and the business transformation one for managing the technology. In general, the IT agenda is designed with the major focus on saving expenses while the digital business transformation one is concentrated on making investments to generate profit.

Another major advantage of hybrid clouds is also agility. For digital businesses, it is really important for them to adapt and change very fast for renewing their companies. Your company may hope to mix various kinds of clouds such as public, private or on – premise resources in order to improve the agility for your growth.

2. The benefits and drawbacks of public clouds

If you agree to collaborate with a service vendor like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, you are taking advantage of a public cloud and hiring a piece of their data center structure. Public clouds are ones offering cloud Infrastructure as a Service. They provide you with an elastic scale and an automatic operation. Thus, it weighs higher than your conventional data center when it comes to the cost or efficiency.

Regarding to the advantages, there are three main aspects to consider. First and foremost, the scalability of public cloud is highly appreciated, which is almost unrestricted because of on – demand cloud resources. Secondly, the public cloud comes with less capital needs. In other words, users do not have to buy their own data center equipment, which is too costly. Last but not least, thanks to its services which are delivered through lots of data centers, the level of reliability is really high.

Nevertheless, every garden has weeds. Public clouds also have some drawbacks. For instance, users will have less management ability for the security of databases. Also, the operational expenditure is also rather high due to performance scaling, which increases the cost.

3. The benefits and drawbacks of private cloud solutions

When you build a cloud infrastructure for your company, it means you are taking advantage of a private cloud. In general, there are three major benefits that you can receive from private cloud solutions. Firstly, it is the safety. Your data and apps will be located behind your own firewall and can be accessed by only your company. As a result, the solution is more suitable for companies with much sensitive data. Secondly, you can have better management and control over your data. Finally, with private cloud solutions, you can flexibly move your less sensitive data to a public cloud so that you can avoid heavy workloads.

When it comes to drawbacks, there are also three points. Compared to public cloud solutions, private ones come with higher costs. More precisely, you may need to pay more at first and make repeated payment for the equipment your buy. Secondly, you need to be responsible for everything from IT hardware to data center if you want to operate and maintain your own cloud server. Last but not least, you have to scale IT resources either up or down when your needs change.

4. Whether a hybrid cloud is suitable for you

Hybrid cloud solutions will provide you with both advantages and disadvantages that you can get from public and private clouds while also make use of the current data center of your company. A hybrid cloud architecture comes with these following aspects. First and foremost, it includes your own data center, both private and public cloud resources as well as workloads which are connected together under the data management. Secondly, you can link your current systems which are operating on conventional architectures that operate the important apps of your companies or comprise of sensitive and important data which is not suitable to be moved to the public cloud.

Finally, hybrid cloud solutions are also depended on a data fabric which makes use of a software access to offer customers a lot of different data services.

5. Trends for hybrid cloud solutions

In terms of trends for hybrid cloud in the future, we can not ignore the ability to change workloads regularly. Secondly, it may be not possible for customers to process big data constantly. They are only able to operate some big data analytics through making use of public cloud resources with highly scalability or by taking advantage of a private cloud to guarantee data safety as well as keep the most sensitive information protected behind the firewall.

Moreover, you can locate your workloads on a public cloud or a private one with less scalability. Then you can check whether this solution is suitable for your company and keep on extending your cloud presence.

There may be some requirements for temporary processing capacity. If you use your own data center with its IT infrastructure, it will cost you more than taking advantage of a hybrid cloud which allows you to allocate the public resources in terms of some temporary projects. Thus, you will not need to make investment to any complicated equipment.

In the future, hybrid cloud is considered to have the highest flexibility. It is undeniable that you will not know how your needs might change in the future even when you are very well prepared to adapt to those changes. In this case, a hybrid cloud will allow you to connect your data requirements to the public cloud, private one or on – premises resources that must be more suitable for your data.